Lecture and discussion within the Film Programmes:



Monday July 2, 2012 at 6 pm - Small cinema hall Tuškanac, Tuškanac 1


 
Film Mutations: The sixth Festival of Invisible Film and the Croatian Film Clubs' Association invite you to a lecture titled "The lavish and eccentric – films by Seijun Suzuki”, that will be held by the film theoretician and professor of Japanese studies Roland Domenig from the Institute of East Asian Studies, University of Vienna. It will take place on the last day of the Seijun Suzuki retrospective in Tuškanac.



Roland Domenig

Lavish and Eccentric – Films by Seijun Suzuki



One hundred years ago, in 1912, the first major Japanese film studio Nikkatsu was established. The turbulent history of the studio is characterized by two periods in particular - the late 1930’s, when Nikkatsu films anticipated postwar Italian neo-realism, as well as the decade from the mid-1950‘s to the mid-1960‘s, during which popular mass entertainment and genre films prevailed. In the years of occupation, Nikkatsu was active only as a distributor of American films, which strongly influenced its films when Nikkatsu restarted its production of original films. Nikkatsu recruited a number of assistant directors from other studios, mostly from the Shôchiku studio, among whom were Shôhei Imamura and Seijun Suzuki. The two of them represented the dual structure of the Japanese studio system – a week-long exchange of dual programs, which consisted of a main film and an bonus one. The main films were more ambitious, made with larger budgets and "big name" actors and were given all the media attention, while the bonus films were low-budget productions made for survival and served broader popular tastes. While Imamura quickly became an internationally acclaimed film director, Seijun Suzuki was committed to B films. Since his directorial debut in 1956, he made a large number of genre films, mostly action and gangster movies, in which he developed and cultivated his distinctive style. In 1963, he achieved his first real success with the movie Youth of the Beast (Yajû not seishun). In the same year, he began working with the set designer Takeo Kimura, who became his close associate and who additionally influenced the development of Suzuki’s visual style. Following this, stylish excess replaced narrative logic and the rules and conventions began to exist only to be violated or ignored. For example Tokyo Drifter (Tokyo nagaremono) is filled with eccentric camera angles and an ardent color aesthetic, lush stylization and excessive mannerism. Suzuki‘s films stupefied the Nikkatsu bosses and they finally fired him in 1968, under the pretext that his films were unintelligible, when he made the movie Branded to Kill (not Koroshi rakuin).

Suzuki’s layoff represented a milestone in the studio‘s history. Although he could not work for the next ten years, the films that he made for Nikkatsu, which critics had until then more or less neglected, were critically reevaluated in Japan and abroad and Suzuki became famous. It is important to emphasize that the reevaluation of his work and the "discovery" of Suzuki as one of the great stylists of the world of film was initiated by Japanese film fans who, after Suzuki’s layoff from Nikkatsu, organized protests against the studio, which kept his films in a bunker. A court trial that eventually took place was a turning point for him, not simply because it challenged the studio’s copyrights, but also because it raised the question of audiences’ rights to see the film. After a rather difficult period during which he occasionally made TV films and commercials, in the 1980’s Suzuki managed to film the so-called Taishô trilogy with the help of the producer Genjirô Arato. It is an impressive film trilogy which won many of the sorts of awards that he had been denied during his Nikkatsu years.

This lecture will examine Suzuki’s career, the particularities of the Japanese studio system in which he developed as a director and characteristics of his films, as well as offering critical acclaim for Suzuki and his films in Japan and abroad.



The lecture will be held in English and the discussion will be moderated by Tanja Vrvilo.



Roland Domenig is an associate professor of Japanese studies at the Institute of East Asian Studies, University of Vienna, Austria. He also works as a film editor and curator of film programs, as a film festival consultant and translator of Japanese films. He is the editor of the publication Art Theatre Guild: Independent Japanese Film 1962-1984 (Vienna, 2003) and author of numerous articles on Japanese film.